Vera Kelly: Lost and Found (Vera Kelly, 3)
April 1971: thirty-year-old private investigator Vera Kelly and her twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend, Maxine (Max), leave their Brooklyn apartment to visit Max’s family in Los Angeles. Kicked out and disowned years before by her wealthy parents, Max wants to reconnect with her mother and sister during a new family upheaval. Max’s father, Aloysius Comstock, has taken in and become engaged to a hot young woman. Max’s mom has fled the massive Bel Aire Comstock estate. On arrival, Vera and Max receive a warm reception from the longtime family chauffeur and are assigned to one of the guest cottages. Various Hollywood scammers roam about the Comstock family compound. Vera and Max soon find imperious Aloysius, who is cold and rude. During the first evening dinner, he incites a nasty argument. Max and Vera get up from the table without even finishing their soup and plan to leave the estate in the morning. When Vera wakes up, Max has vanished.
Vera must now tap into all her PI skills to track down the love of her life. The missing-person mystery plot has some holes and contains no unusual or profound twists. However, Knecht’s exploration of Vera and Max’s prior lives and present relationship, each with the constant challenges of being gay, is well done. Detailed scene-settings, character portrayals, and dialogue, while sometimes a bit long, are engaging and often funny, particularly for those not familiar with Southern California of fifty years ago. The heart of the novel—Vera’s introspections on disappointed family and society’s reactions to a same-sex couple—will resonate with many readers.
